Early men of letters

We usually read authorised biographies suspiciously, compromised as they are by the need to gratify their subjects. Here is the life story of the book that made Oxford University Press famous, commissioned by that very press. Yet it would be a mean spirit who did not find the account engaging and its conclusion a triumph.

Work on the strangest and most wonderful of all reference books began in 1860. The ideal of a dictionary that would include "everything" was promoted by the amateur, yet extraordinarily learned, scholars of London's Philological Society. It would be historical as well as inclusive - recording the dates at which words first appeared, or new meanings were born. Richard Chenevix Trench, Dean of Westminster when he was not being a philologist, had the brilliant idea of setting to work volunteer readers - all those fellow amateur enthusiasts for English - in search of telling examples of usage.

The first editor, Herbert Coleridge, the poet's grandson, had scarcely commissioned pigeonholes for the quotation slips before he died of tuberculosis. The second editor, Frederick James Furnivall, dissipated his considerable energies in too many other activities, from coaching lady scullers to political agitation. Luckily, his replacement was James Augustus Henry Murray, a 38-year-old teacher at Mill Hill School.

Murray was a linen draper's son from the Scottish borders, a Calvinist with an extraordinary fund of self-acquired learning who had left school aged 14. He had made himself an expert philologist and convinced the learned delegates of Oxford University Press that he was the man for the job. (Cambridge University Press was offered the dictionary, but turned it down.)

The millions of quotation slips were housed in Murray's "Scriptorium", the corrugated iron shed which his wife, Ada, saw advertised in a gardening magazine. It was lined with hundreds of pigeonholes, installed by his carpenter brother-in-law. When Murray moved to Oxford six years later, the second Scriptorium, a corrugated iron shed, was built in the garden of his house in Banbury Road (the original was donated to Mill Hill School). Here he presided for the next 30 years, freezing in winter, broiled in summer, always sporting the black silk academic cap acquired when receiving an honorary degree from Edinburgh University.

Murray's Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public to comb literature for telling uses of words, inserted into books in shops and libraries throughout Britain, North America and the Empire, brought sample quotations to the Scriptorium at the rate of 1,000 a day. Simon Winchester makes an absorbing account of the laborious, inexorable processes by which they were read, sorted, subdivided, checked, inspected for differences in the senses of a single word, and then had definitions attached to them by Murray. Each of his 11 children was conscripted at a tender age.

Several times the project almost sank. Murray was probably saved by the appointment as co-editor of Henry Bradley, another largely self-tutored polymath. The learning of many of his volunteer readers was also extraordinary. Winchester has already written a book about DWC Minor, the murderer who worked for the dictionary for 21 years from his cell at Broadmoor.

There were others almost as odd, such as Fitzedward Hall, a self-taught philologist who became a recluse after an obscure quarrel with a rival academic. He wrote daily to Murray for two decades with useful quotations or corrected proofs (the two men never met). You are left with the impression that only eccentrics and obsessives could have seen his magnum opus through.

Murray died in 1915, in sight of the finish, still working on T. All the first generation of those who had presided over the dictionary died before it was completed in 1928.

Yet the steady publication of its instalments or "fascicles" - "the longest sensational serial ever written," said Arnold Bennett - had long since made it part of the culture. Winchester's entertaining narrative is avowedly celebratory and scarcely questions the first dictionary's definitions or sources. Other books can do this. Those indefatigable Victorian autodidacts deserve their celebration.